Illiteracy: Incurable Disease or Education Malpractice?

By Robert W. Sweet, Jr., Co-Founder & Former President, The National Right to Read Foundation, 1996

Robert Sweet is a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Education, White House domestic policy advisor to President Reagan, head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency under President Bush, and former high-school teacher. In July 1997, he resigned as President of the foundation to become a professional staff member on the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Introduction

"Learning to read is like learning to drive a car. You take
lessons and learn the mechanics and the rules of the road. After a few weeks
you have learned how to drive, how to stop, how to shift gears, how to park,
and how to signal. You have also learned to stop at a red light and understand
road signs. When you are ready, you take a road test, and if you pass, you
can drive. Phonics-first works the same way. The child learns the mechanics
of reading, and when he's through, he can read. Look and say works differently.
The child is taught to read before he has learned the mechanics—the sounds
of the letters. It is like learning to drive by starting your car and driving
ahead. . .And the mechanics of driving? You would pick those up as you go
along."

Rudolf Flesch, "Why Johnny Still Can't Read," 1981

Illiteracy in America is still growing
at an alarming rate and that fact has not changed much since Rudolf Flesch
wrote his best-selling expose of reading instruction in 1955. Illiteracy
continues to be a critical problem, demanding enormous resources from local,
state, and federal taxes, while arguments about how to teach children to
read continue to rage within the education research community, on Capitol
Hill, in business, and in the classroom.

The International Reading Association estimates
that more than one thousand research papers are prepared each year on the
subject of literacy, and that is very likely a low figure. For the past 50
years, America's classrooms have been used by psychologists, sociologists,
educationists, and politicians as a giant laboratory for unproven, untried
theories of learning, resulting in a near collapse of public education. It
is time we begin to move away from "what's new" and move toward "what works."

The grim statistics

According to the National Adult Literacy
Survey, 42 million adult Americans can't read; 50 million can recognize so
few printed words they are limited to a 4th or 5th grade reading level; one
out of every four teenagers drops out of high school, and of those who graduate,
one out of every four has the equivalent or less of an eighth grade education.

According to current estimates, the number
of functionally illiterate adults is increasing by approximately two and
one quarter million persons each year. This number includes nearly 1 million
young people who drop out of school before graduation, 400,000 legal immigrants,
100,000 refugees, and 800,000 illegal immigrants, and 20 % of all high school
graduates. Eighty-four percent of the 23,000 people who took an exam for entry-level
jobs at New York Telephone in 1988, failed. More than half of Fortune 500
companies have become educators of last resort, with the cost of remedial
employee training in the three R's reaching more than 300 million dollars
a year. One estimate places the yearly cost in welfare programs and unemployment
compensation due to illiteracy at six billion dollars. An additional 237
billion dollars a year in unrealized earnings is forfeited by persons who
lack basic reading skills, according to Literacy Volunteers of America.

The federal government alone has more
than 79 literacy-related programs administered by 14 federal agencies. The
total amount of money being spent on illiteracy by the federal government
can only be guessed at, because there has never been a complete assessment
prepared. A conservative estimate would place the amount at more than ten
billion dollars each year, and growing steadily.

Why does America have a reading problem?

The question that must be asked is this:
Why does America have a reading problem at all? We are the most affluent
and technologically advanced of all the industrial nations on earth. We have
"free" compulsory education for all, a network of state-owned and -operated
teachers' colleges, strict teacher certification requirements, and more money
and resources dedicated to educating our children than any other nation on
earth.

Rudolf Flesch, author of "Why Johnny Can't
Read," wrote the following in a letter to his daughter in 1955, after teaching
his grandson to read:

"Since I started to work with Johnny,
I have looked into this whole reading business. I worked my way through a
mountain of books and articles on the subject, I talked to dozens of people,
and I spent many hours in classrooms, watching what was going on.

What I found is absolutely fantastic. The
teaching of reading -- all over the United States, in all the schools, in
all the textbooks -- is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic
and common sense. Johnny couldn't read until half a year ago for the simple
reason that nobody ever showed him how."

Time magazine called his book "the outstanding
educational event of that year" and suggested that he represented "the devil
in the flesch" to the education establishment.

There is an answer to "why Johnny can't
read," but the answer is tough medicine to swallow. It requires education
professionals, who for years have been engaged in a form of education malpractice,
to admit that the methods of teaching reading they have vigorously advocated
and staunchly defended ever since the 1930's are dead wrong.

If we are to seriously reverse the increasing
number of illiterate adults in America and prevent the problem of illiteracy,
we must swallow the medicine, as quickly as possible, and reject the instructional
methods that have resulted in the widespread illiteracy we have today.

Two ways to teach reading

Historically, all American school children
were taught to read. Teachers never considered that a child "could not" be
taught to read, and remedial reading was unheard of. In fact, the first remedial
reading clinic opened in 1930, soon after the results of the "look and say"
(the so-called "Dick and Jane" program) reading methods were beginning to
be felt.

Up until the early part of the 20th century,
children were taught to read by first learning the alphabet, then the sounds
of each letter, how they blended into syllables, and how those syllables
made up words. They were taught that English spelling is logical and systematic,
and that to become a fluent reader it was necessary to master the alphabetic
"code" in which English words are written, to the point where it (the code)
is used automatically with little conscious thought given to it.

Once a child learned the mechanics of
the code, attention could be turned to more advanced content. It seldom,
if ever, occurred to teachers to give children word lists to read, or to
make beginning readers memorize whole words before learning the components
of those words, or to memorize whole stories as today's proponents of the
"whole language approach" recommend.

Several recent studies funded by the U.S.
Department of Education, including "Preventing Reading Failure: The Myths
of Reading Instruction," found that 90 percent of remedial reading students
today are not able to decode fluently, accurately, and at an automatic level
of response. In a March, 1989, Phi Delta Kappan article, Harvard Professor
Jeanne Chall (author of "Learning to Read: The Great Debate") cites a study
by Peter Freebody and Brian Byrne, that confirms the same finding. Today's
students are not being taught the fundamental structure of language, but
rather are engaged in what Dr. Kenneth Goodman (a proponent of "the whole
language approach") has called a "psycholinguistic guessing game."

One philosophy of teaching reading is
usually called "whole language" but many other labels are used to describe
it, such as: the whole-word method; language experience; psycholinguistics;
look and say; reading recovery; balanced literacy; or integrated reading
instruction. The "whole language" or "look and say" method teaches that children
should memorize or "guess" at words in context by using initial letter or
picture clues. According to estimates given in one widely used "look and
say" reading series, a child taught this method should be able to recognize
349 words by the end of the first grade; 1,094 by the end of the second; 1,216
by the end of the third; and 1,554 by the end of the fourth grade. Learning
to read this way is supposed to be more meaningful and fun. This way of teaching
is currently used by nearly all of the schools in the United States. It is
clear that the current high illiteracy rate is directly due to this scientifically
invalidated approach to reading instruction.

Another approach is called intensive, systematic
phonics first. With this technique, children are taught how to sound out
and blend the letters that make up words in a specific sequence, from the
simple to the complex. Today, educators call this method the "code" approach
because it teaches the skills and logic children need to understand the English
spelling system. When a child comes to school he or she has a spoken vocabulary
of up to 24,000 words. Children taught to read using systematic phonics can
usually read and understand at least as many words as they have in their
spoken vocabulary by the end of the third grade.

Teaching children to read is the most
important objective educators have to accomplish. Reading is a prerequisite
for everything else, not only in school but in life itself. Western civilization
has taught its children to read using an alphabetic approach ever since the
Phoenicians invented the alphabet and the Egyptians stopped writing in hieroglyphics.
English is an alphabetic language that, when written, uses letters to represent
speech sounds.

When students were taught to read, they
consciously identified the speech sounds and learned to recognize the letters
used to represent them. They were then trained to apply this information
to "decode" the names of unknown written words, understand their meaning,
and comprehend the information presented as a complete thought.

The English language contains approximately
half a million words. Of these words, about 300 compose about three-quarters
of the words we use regularly. In schools where the "whole language" is taught,
children are constantly memorizing "sight" words during the first three or
four grades of school, but are never taught how to unlock the meaning of
the other 499,700 or more words. Reading failure usually shows up after the
fourth grade, when the volume of words needed for reading more difficult
material, in science, literature, history, or math cannot be memorized quickly
enough. The damage to children who have not been taught phonics usually lies
hidden until they leave the controlled vocabulary of the basal readers, for
more difficult books where guessing, or memorizing new words just does not
work. The result is that textbooks in the middle and upper grades are "dumbed"
down to a fourth or fifth grade reading level.

This is the real reason why the SAT scores
have dropped to such low levels during the last three decades.

From the time the alphabet was invented
until the time of French scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal, reading
was taught by memorizing the sounds of syllables, and then stringing them
together to make words. But Pascal found that by separating the syllables
into their letter parts, one could learn to read more effectively and efficiently.
His method was intended only to assist in the very beginning stages of reading,
when a child is learning the printed syllables of his own language.

Former teacher and researcher Geraldine
Rodgers puts it this way: "It was only for this purpose that Pascal invented
it [phonics], to make the previously almost unending memorization of regularly
formed syllables . . .unnecessary. But phonics works, and has since 1655.
So it is not surprising that it was invented by one of the most towering mathematical
and scientific geniuses in history, Blaise Pascal . . ."

19th century: "look and say" introduced

In 1837, Horace Mann, a lawyer and Secretary
of the Massachusetts Board of Education, proposed to the Boston School Masters
the adoption of a "new method" of reading that began with the memorization
of whole words rather than just learning the letter sounds and blending them
into words. His "new method" was based on the work of Thomas A. Gallaudet,
who had developed a way to teach deaf children to read. Since deaf children
had no ability to "sound out" letters, syllables, or words, the constant
repetition of "sight" words from a controlled vocabulary seemed to be the
most efficient way to teach them to read.

Adapting the work of Gallaudet, Horace
Mann and his wife Mary developed a reading program that applied the same
principles to students who had no hearing impairment. His method was tried
for about six years in the Boston schools, and then soundly rejected by the
Boston School Masters in 1844. Samuel Stillwell Greene, then principal of
the Phillips Grammar School in Boston, expressed the views of the Boston
School Masters, and the following excerpt from his essay is as relevant today
as it was in 1844:

"Education is a great concern; it has
often been tampered with by vain theorists; it has suffered much from the
stupid folly and the delusive wisdom of its treacherous friends; and we hardly
know which have injured it most. Our conviction is, that it has much more
to hope from the collected wisdom and common prudence of the community, than
from the suggestions of the individual. Locke injured it by his theories,
and so did Rousseau, and so did Milton. All their plans were too splendid
to be true. It is to be advanced by conceptions, neither soaring above the
clouds, nor groveling on the earth, -- but by those plain, gradual, productive,
common-sense improvements, which use may encourage and experience suggest.
We are in favor of advancement, provided it be towards usefulness. . . .
We love the secretary, but we hate his theories. They stand in the way of
substantial education. It is impossible for a sound mind not to hate them."

The establishment of the normal school
to train teachers at the same time Horace Mann was promoting the "new method"
was not coincidental because these institutions became the vehicle by which
to continue promoting the "new method." With the help of John Dewey at the
University of Chicago, Arthur Gates at Columbia Teachers College, and the
growing network of normal schools springing up around the country, direct,
intensive, systematic phonics was debunked in favor of the whole word "look
and say" way of teaching reading, with no research to support it.

1930: "basal reading" series introduced

In 1930-31, William S. Gray and Arthur
I. Gates introduced a "basal reading" series which incorporated the methods
used to teach the deaf to read. Today's basal reading books, still used by
a high percentage of American school children, are essentially the same as
the 1930-31 Gates and Gray books. Their most harmful aspect is their rigidly
controlled vocabulary, and emphasis on memorizing whole words before the
letter sounds are learned.

With "whole language," the controlled
vocabulary of earlier "basal readers" has been abandoned. Children are now
required to read words like "forsythia" before they have been taught how
to sound out these new words. This causes frustration, poor spelling, and
a hostility towards reading. Very bright children who can't memorize long
lists of words and retain their meaning are placed in special education,
when all they need is to be taught the 26 letters of the alphabet, the 44
sounds they make, and the 70 common ways to spell those sounds. Some researchers
believe dyslexia and the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder are actually
caused by this reversal of the normal learning sequence.

Children trained to read by whole language
are made almost deaf to print if they are unable to sound out a printed new
word like "gate" or "frog" by the beginning of second grade. In fact, they
are almost as deaf to the sounds of the printed words as a deaf person is
to the sounds of spoken words.

Research provides the answer

In 1967, Harvard Professor Jeanne Chall
released her review of reading methods with the conclusion that:

"[The phonics approach (code emphasis)
produces] better results, at least up to the point where sufficient evidence
seems to be available, the end of the third grade. The results are better,
not only in terms of the mechanical aspects of literacy alone, as was once
supposed, but also in terms of the ultimate goals of reading instruction
- comprehension and possibly even the speed of reading."

In 1973, Dr. Robert Dykstra, professor
of education at the University of Minnesota, reviewed 59 studies and concluded
that:

"We can summarize the results of 60 years
of research dealing with beginning reading instruction by stating that early
systematic instruction in phonics provides the child with the skills necessary
to become an independent reader at an earlier age than is likely if phonics
instruction is delayed or less systematic."

In 1973, Samuel Blumenfeld wrote "The
New Illiterates," which further exposed the history of how our children are
being damaged by being taught reading with improper methods:

"In the course of researching this book,
I made a shocking, incredible discovery: that for the last forty years the
. . . children of America have been taught to read by a method originally
conceived and used in the early 1800s to teach the deaf how to read, an [experimental]
method which has long since been discarded by the teachers of the deaf themselves
as inadequate and outmoded. Yet, today, the vast majority of . . . American
children are still being taught by this very method. The result has been
widespread reading disability."

In 1979, a three-volume collection of
papers by leading researchers was published titled "Theory and Practice of
Early Reading," edited by Lauren Resnick of the University of Pittsburg and
Phyllis Weaver of Harvard. Of the 59 contributors, 53 (about 90 percent)
were in favor of systematic phonics and against the prevailing "look and
say" method, which they considered harmful.

Following is one quote from this study
that is of particular significance:

"First, as a matter of routine practice,
we need to include systematic, code-oriented instruction in the primary grades,
no matter what else is also done. This is the only place in which we have
any clear evidence for any particular practice."

In 1983, Harvard professor Jeanne Chall
reaffirmed her previous research findings and recommended that teacher training
be changed to require the teaching of intensive, systematic phonics, essentially
the same approach that had been used successfully before the "look and say"
method was introduced.

In 1985, the U.S. Department of Education
released a report prepared by the Commission on Reading titled "Becoming
a Nation of Readers," which once again confirmed the obvious:

"Classroom research shows that, on the
average, children who are taught phonics get off to a better start in learning
to read than children who are not taught phonics. . . . The picture that
emerges from the research is that phonics facilitates word identification
and that fast, accurate word identification is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for comprehension. . . . Thus, the issue is no longer, as it was
several decades ago, whether children should be taught phonics. The issues
now are specific ones of just how it should be done."

In 1991 another major study was released
by the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois, titled
"Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning about Print: A Summary," by Marilyn
Jager Adams. This study is of particular interest to teachers, because it
once again reaffirms the need to teach the English language as a system,
and suggests that well-developed concepts about the form and function of
print, including rapid recognition of letters, awareness of sounds in spoken
words, and rich experience with books and stories, are important underpinnings
for children's success in learning to read. Dr. Adams states:

"All children will benefit from and many
children require systematic, direct instruction in the elements of the alphabetic
code."

How have educators responded to research?

Since admitting fault is not an easy thing
for anyone to do, most education professionals respond to research findings
that advocate the teaching of intensive systematic phonics with the following
excuses: there isn't an illiteracy problem; we do teach phonics; no one method
is best; English isn't phonetic; word calling isn't reading; the child isn't
ready; the child has a reading disability; it's the parents fault; it's too
much TV. But if we are to solve the problem of illiteracy in America, we
must stop making excuses and take immediate action to change the way reading
is taught.

In December of 1982, a survey of 1609
professors of reading in 300 graduate schools was conducted. When asked which
reading authorities of all time, in their opinion, had written the most significant,
most worthy, "classic" studies in reading, the top three individuals on the
list, in order, were Frank Smith, Kenneth Goodman and Edmund Huey, all well-known,
vociferous, dedicated, dogmatic, enemies of early, intensive teaching of
phonics. Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman are two of today's most influential
proponents of the "look and say" or as they would term it, "whole language"
philosophy of teaching reading.

San Diego State University Professor Patrick
Groff recently reviewed 43 reading texts, all published in the1980's and
used by teachers' colleges in training reading teachers, to see if they included
the findings of researchers that the "code-emphasis" or phonics approach
to teaching reading should be used. He found that none of these books advocate
phonics. In fact, only nine of these books inform teachers that there is
current debate about if or when phonics should be taught.

Despite the overwhelming volume of research
supporting early, intensive, systematic instruction in phonics, college textbooks
used by most university departments of education fail to apply this research
in the training of prospective teachers.

The National Education Association declared
in the 1983-84 Annual Edition of "Today's Education" that "the overemphasis
on phonics with beginners" is now "ready for the scrap heap."

Why do faulty reading methods continue to be used?

It's Big Business!

The sale of instructional reading programs
is big business today, as it has been since the 1930's when the basal reading
series for elementary schools were introduced.

Each year publishing companies compete
for the adoption of reading programs in states like California and Texas
where millions of dollars of expendable "look and say" workbooks are purchased
every year. Many Americans will recognize Dick and Jane, Alice and Jerry,
Janet and Mark, Danny and Sue, or Tom and Betty. These are the characters
in the "look and say" readers that most of us grew up with.

The 1986 National Advisory Council on
Adult Education report, "Illiteracy in America" cites several examples of
how the cost of reading instruction can be reduced, while at the same time
improving reading scores:

"In her book, "Programmed Illiteracy in
Our Schools," [Mary Johnson] says that: `The workbooks to a sight method
[`look and say'] basal series soon become superfluous whenever phonics is
taught by a direct method. . . .the annual expenditure on workbooks was more
than four times greater than that on hardcover readers [used in a phonics-first
program]. (The workbooks have to be replaced each year because the children
write in them.)'"

The Superintendent of Schools in Seekonk,
Massachusetts hired a private-sector organization to train his primary-grade
teachers in intensive systematic phonics. The cost of reading materials to
implement the new program was eighty-eight percent less per pupil than the
"look and say" or "whole language" reading program previously used in the
district.

"Mr. H. Marc Mason, Principal of Benjamin
Franklin Elementary School in Mesa, Arizona, said that in 1978 his school
spent $23.42 per student on reading materials. In the same year, his teachers
were trained [to teach phonics]. By 1981, expenditures for reading materials
had dropped to $8.50 per student, [while at the same time] achievement scores
. . . surpassed the national, state, and district norms in language as well
as in math."

In his book, "Preventing Reading Failure:
An Examination of the Myths of Reading Instruction," Dr. Patrick Groff devotes
an entire chapter to a question that is most commonly asked: Why do the myths
of reading instruction prevail? The answer is summarized below.

There is no single reason for the fact
that research findings are not applied in teacher training institutions,
or in the classroom. Common sense is defeated by the:

Most teachers use methods of teaching reading
that their professors teach them, or they follow the teachers' guide for
the textbook series used in their school system, neither of which present
logical and systematic instruction in phonics. In an Education Week article,
June 12, 1985, Rudolf Flesch concluded:

"Decades of painstaking research have
shown that neither our schools nor our teachers are to blame [for the illiteracy
problem in America]. Rather, the fault lies with a method of teaching reading
that was first proposed for general use in 1927 and has since been adopted
in most of our schools. It is called the 'whole-word' [look and say] method
because it relies on memorizing the shapes and meanings of whole words. It
was introduced with the best intentions: the idea was to make learning to
read more fun for our children. Today, it is almost universally used in this
country."

The results are evident in an illiteracy
rate that is the highest in our history. We should not place the blame on
our teachers but rather, we need a major overhaul of our teacher training
institutions. We will not halt the continued spread of illiteracy in America
without this critical reform.

Moving from what's new to what works

From the early 1960's to the mid 1980's,
the Reading Reform Foundation was in the forefront of efforts to apply research
findings to the teaching of reading. Since that time, hundreds of teachers
and thousands of children have benefited from the practical application of
the sound, proven, techniques of reading instruction the Reading Reform Foundation
has promoted. In 1993, The National Right to Read Foundation picked up the
phonics torch and is carrying the message to the nation, that direct, systematic
phonics is an essential first step in teaching reading. Below are just a
few of the success stories that can be told, and the implication for the
nation's schools should be crystal clear.

If children are taught intensive, systematic
phonics at an early age, until it is automatically applied in the reading
process, then illiteracy is dramatically reduced, comprehension improves,
and remediation is virtually unnecessary, except for very few.

Mary was a teacher in the Sunnyside School
District for fifteen years where achievement in reading, math, and writing
was always last. "People would say, 'Well, it's these children.' That offended
me because I subscribe to the idea that God don't make no junk." She was
appointed to a study committee to come up with recommendations on how to improve
achievement levels, and one suggestion that the committee approved was to
introduce "phonics." Mary had been taught that phonics was "grunt and spit,"
and that children taught phonics had no fluency in reading and, even if they
could read they had no comprehension or understanding. Many other policies
were adopted by the review committee, including ways to involve parents,
improve discipline, and strengthen teacher training, but the most important
policy was the introduction of intensive, systematic phonics. After four
years the results were unassailable.

The school was open to everyone in the
district on a "first-come, first-served" basis; the capacity was 623 students;
58 percent were minority students; many children came from low-income families;
no federal money came to the school other than the school lunch program;
there were no learning disabilities teachers, and no need for them; there
was no bilingual education because everyone spoke English, and even if children
didn't speak English when they came into the school, they did when they left;
the grading system had a higher standard than the other 18 schools in the
district, and yet 33 percent of students on the district Honor Roll were
from Gallegos; and perhaps most important of all, 46 percent of the students
in the intermediate grades were former special education students. After
one year, only four students remained in the special education category.

When Mr. Micciche became Superintendent
of Schools, in Groveton, New Hampshire, he served one of the 20 poorest counties
in the country. He was charged by his School Board to "do something" about
the poor reading scores, which were then averaging in the 45th percentile.
Everyone, including teachers, parents, and board members, was dissatisfied.
After considerable study and research, he concluded the following: "At a
point in our not-too-distant past - some would put the time in the 1920's
or '30's - a conflagration was let loose in our nation's classrooms, a bonfire
of confusion in the form of a new reading method, look-say, or whole word,
which devastated the reading ability of several generations of children,
which blackened the landscape of reason, which has given us the scarred legacy
we recognize today as illiteracy."

But rather than wring his hands in despair,
or ask for more money, Mr. Micciche and his teachers decided to try intensive,
systematic phonics. After a two-week training course, about a third of the
primary teachers wanted to try the system. Within three months, the success
of their children was so dramatic, all of their colleagues joined in the
trial program. Another full year's trial was conducted, and the test scores
climbed to, and remained at, the mid-to-high 60th percentile range. At the
urging of the staff, and with the enthusiastic support of the parents, intensive
phonics was in, and "look and say" was out.

The success of intensive systematic phonics
was evident in the improvement of academic achievement, but another side
benefit not to be overlooked was its cost-effectiveness. The old "look and
say" system was costing about twenty dollars per child per year to maintain.
The cost of the new program over an eight-year period amounted to an average
annual cost of less than three dollars per pupil. All of this for a program
that worked, satisfied the staff and community, lifted reading scores to
the mid-sixties on standardized tests, and gave remarkable reading power
and enjoyment to the children.

The inescapable message: teach intensive,
systematic phonics!

Example # 3 - ask Sue Dickson, author and former first-grade
teacher

"In college I had been taught that phonics
doesn't work, that the English language is too complicated to be taught that
way, and I swallowed that reasoning hook, line and sinker. . . . So, during
my first two years as a teacher, I didn't use any phonics. But in 1954[sic],
my mother bought a book by Rudolf Flesch called `Why Johnny Can't Read.'"
At first Sue rejected his recommendations. After all she was "the one. .
.with the teaching degree." Finally she decided that she had to do something
because ". . . I was losing whole groups of students through the cracks.
. . . I decided I would give phonics a try. But I was so scared. My professors
had been so adamantly against it. [But the result was that] my class had scored
so high on the standardized tests that the [school] administrators thought
I had cheated [in reporting my test scores]!" She never went back to teaching
"look and say" again.

Then she began to develop her own system
of teaching reading, using the principles of phonics, but also using music
to make it easier for the children to learn the letter sounds. It took her
thirty years to perfect the system, but now hundreds of teachers are using
her program "Sing, Spell, Read and Write" with thousands of children, from
Maine to California, Michigan to Texas! One school system in Mississippi that
used the program in 1988 found that students who were first graders in 1987
improved their reading performance by 42 percentile points on the Stanford
Achievement Tests. Reading comprehension improved 34 percentile points, and
spelling went up 30 points.

The message is clear: teach intensive,
systematic phonics!

Example #4 - ask the thousands of satisfied customers of "Hooked
on Phonics"

In 1984, Sean Shanahan's son came home
from school very upset, so upset that he threw up his supper. This went on
for several days, and finally after much discussion with his son, and the
school officials, the answer came. His son couldn't read. His frustration
was so great it made him physically ill. In desperation, Sean, who had learned
to read using phonics, decided to make a tape of the letter sounds, set to
music, for his son to practice. Within a few weeks, his son could read. Word
spread, and soon neighbors borrowed, or copied the tapes, and their children
began to read as well. And thus, "Hooked on Phonics" was born. Thousands
of "Hooked on Phonics" products have been shipped, and thousands of grateful,
satisfied customers sent letters of appreciation for the gift of reading they
received. A passing phenomenon, one might ask? No, just common sense, an
entrepreneural spirit, and the truth about how children learn to read.

The inescapable message: teach intensive,
systematic, phonics!

Which federal programs impact illiteracy?

According to the Congressional Research
Service, federal assistance for adult education and literacy programs is
primarily authorized through the Adult Education Act (AEA). The AEA serves
3.5 million people annually, with an FY92 appropriation of [$155] million.
Compensatory education (Chapter 1) is specifically targeted toward low-income
families, and teaching reading is a major emphasis of this program. The FY96
funding for Chapter 1 is $6.9 billion.

Several major studies that have addressed
the extent of illiteracy have been funded by the federal government over
the years. These include the "National Assessment of Educational Progress,"
"Follow Through," the "Adult Performance Level" (APL) study, and most recently,
the Commission on Reading report, "Becoming a Nation of Readers," which provided
a synthesis of reading research and the present state-of-the-art of reading
instruction.

The cumulative amount of money spent on
illiteracy by the federal government over the past 25 years has been staggering.
The following programs are only the tip of the iceberg:

The six government agencies that provide
the most funding for the problem of illiteracy are: The U.S. Departments
of Education (29 programs), Labor (3 programs), Health & Human Services
(12 programs), Justice (2 programs), Defense (5 programs), and State (2 programs).

In the National Literacy Act of 1991,
the U.S. Congress established the National Institute for Literacy, with a
recommended budget of $5 million and the goal of developing:

"...integrated programs of research and
development, identification and validation of effective practices, technical
assistance, and dissemination activities designed to improve adult literacy
and basic education skills needed for productive employment and citizenship."

Although the purpose of the National Institute
for Literacy is laudable, it is unlikely that progress will be made toward
a literate America, unless there is an acknowledgement that research has
already validated effective practices in teaching an individual to read.
What we need is action, not more research, more talk, and more wasted
taxpayer dollars!

Now is the time for action!

The overwhelming evidence from research
and classroom results indicates that the cure for the "disease of illiteracy"
is the restoration of the instructional practice of intensive, systematic
phonics in every primary school in America!

Established in January 1993, the sole
purpose of The National Right to Read Foundation is to eliminate illiteracy
in America by returning direct, systematic phonics to every first-grade classroom
in America. To accomplish this objective will take the collective effort
of parents, teachers, legislators, and public-minded citizens all across
America. Unless we change the way our children are being taught to read,
we run the risk of becoming a nation of illiterates, unable to compete in
the international marketplace, and with increasing dependence on government
support at home.

Sources

R.C. Anderson, E.H. Heibert, J.A. Scott,
and I.A.G. Wilkinson, "Becoming A Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission
on Reading," 1985.

Jeanne Allen, "Illiteracy In America:
What To Do About It," The Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC, Feb., 1989.

U.S. Congress, "Illiteracy and the Scope
of The Problem in This Country," Hearing before the Subcommittee on Postsecondary
Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives,
97th Congress, Washington, D.C., Sept., 1982.

U.S. Congress, "Illiteracy in America,"
Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational
Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives,
and the Subcommittee on Education, Arts and Humanities, of the Committee
on Labor and Human Resources, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C., August 1, October
1 and 3, 1985.

Sue Dickson, excerpted from a transcript
of an interview at her home in Chesapeake, VA, 1989.